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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

> The Republic had a culture that very much treated war as a glorious thing, and mobilized the public for total war, over and over again.

This is contrary to the modern world where democratic countries are much less willing to go to war

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It certainly feels like the US has been in more wars in the last 100 years than any 100 years of Roman history.

It's actually surprisingly close. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_wars_and_battles, there were 21 Roman wars in the 2nd Century BC. US count (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...) for the 20th century AD is 31, but you also have to factor in the fact that the whole world is much more connected, and that the Roman war-and-intervention count was almost certainly limited by communication and transportation abilities of the time. In the context of the ancient world, 21 wars by one state in one century seems like an enormous number. The Achaemenid Persian empire, which existed a few centuries prior and was very expansionist for its time, averaged perhaps 6-8 wars per century, depending on how you quantify wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Iran).

And also rely on a lot less infantry so casualties are lower. Even with as brutal as Russia-Ukraine is, the total number of military men killed is comparable to a single decent-sized WWII battle

I don't think one can reasonably compare modern democracies with universal suffrage, with the Roman Republic which had a much more limited voting population. Also the Roman Republic was, for much of its history, at war with his neighbors, so it had the civil structures and incentives (at all levels of the society) that went with near-constant war, so choosing to continue to go to war was an easy decision.

My experience has been to the contrary.

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